New Music update Feb 9th, 2009

We’ve made another music update today, there are now 1600 more albums on Spotify including Lily Allen’s latest, It’s Not Me, It’s You.

All these new albums are published in this Google Doc if you’re interested in seeing what we’ve added. And as always some releases may not be available in your region.

We’re still looking into better ways to publish updates both on the blog and within Spotify, so if think an Atom feed or some other file type would be better let me know and we’ll see what we can come up with.

I have only one question: Why is there one Depeche Mode studio album missing in Spotify – Ultra? Seems strange since they are all released on the same label.

Also, Where is “101” and “Songs of Faith and Devotion: Live”? And the rest of the singles boxes (Spotify has some of part 1, 2, 3, 5, none of 4)? These weird “holes” in the content makes me question the legality of the sources…

Music legal issues are highly complex – sometimes only certain tracks are available because a multitude of reasons. For example, the songwriter of that particular song might still retain the rights and have not released them to the record company.

Also, Spotify is going through the process of working out what they can and can’t have, so things will probably be a little unstable for the moment ^^

While the addition of new music can only be a good thing, without any information describing the regional restrictions it’s hard to gauge how many of the 1600 albums (it would also be better to refer to the number of tracks in the update as albums is very imprecise) are accessible to me as a user. After taking a quick glance at the attached spreadsheet it would appear that about 90% of this update is German based artists. I would be interested to know how much of this update is actually accessible by users outside of Germany?

I know you’re doing the best you can, and i really love Spotify, couldn’t have come at a better time seeing as just about everyone owns a notebook and an internet connection at the time, but i still miss some stuff. Keep up the good work.